Team Blog

With this new report, SnapABug shows you when you are receiving most Live chat and Offline interactions.

Using this knowledge, you can now plan on being online when your website visitors need you the most. This means more sales and increased customer satisfaction!

You can configure the report to show you the activity per hour of the day in your time zone and filter what day of the week you want to look at.

See it for your SnapABug widget here

Several of you asked us to get SnapABug talking to ATLASSIAN JIRA.

So here it is!

As always, no programing or modification of JIRA is necessary to use this integration. Simply select JIRA in the “Set Destination” tab, provide your server address, your login credential and specify the project where you want the bugs to go. This is it, your SnapABug live chat and offline requests will go directly into your project in JIRA.

Please give it a try and let us know how we can make it better for you.

Cheers,

One of our primary goal when designing SnapABug is too keep it very simple for the most common use case scenarios. However, there are situations where a few additional parameters are necessary to make SnapABug work exactly right for your specific needs.

In order to keep the main widget configuration interface fairly simple we’ve grouped those more complex functionalities under the “advanced” sections.

The capability we would like to introduce today is one of them.

Because you may not always want to receive Live Chat transcripts in your Help Desk, Bug Tracker or CRM solution (Zendesk, Salesforce, Fogbugz or Pivotal Tracker), we now have two modes for sending those chat transcripts.

You can either continue sending all chat transcripts to your destination system by default, but manually tell SnapABug to not send the current chat by typing the command ‘\ignore’.

Or you can change SnapABug default behavior to never send chat transcripts to your destination system unless you type ‘\record’ during the chat.

You can find this new option in the “Live Chat” tab, in the “Advanced” section.

Simply choose the mode that works best for you!

Cheers,

We’ve recently added support for more languages. We though it might be useful to list them all here.

So here we go: You can choose to show SnapABug to your website visitors in any of those languages:

Don’t see your language here? Please contact us and we will make it happen together.

SnapABug includes an handy feature to populate any information it captures to standard or custom fields in Zendesk.

In this example, we will show you how to load two types of information into Zendesk.
- The Web Browser used by the website visitor
- The account type of the user, made available by the application in a JavaScript variable.

First, Let’s create custom Ticket fields in Zendesk

In the menu “MANAGE“, Select “Ticket Fields” and cick on “Add custom field”

Select a field type “Text”

give the field a name and click “Add field”

Now let’s configure our data mapping in SnapABug

In a different browser window (we’ll need to get back to Zendesk later), open your SnapABug widget configurator. (or click on this link: http://snapabug.com/widget)

Go in the “Set Destination” tab and click on “Advanced”

You will there discover the custom data mapper for Zendesk

We will first create a new mapping to send the Browser information to our new custom field in Zendesk.

Select source type = SnapABug, Source value = Browser and assign them to the Zendesk object = Ticket, Type = Custom and Zendesk ticket = {your custom field id}

To find your custom field Id, you can go back in Zendesk, click on “edit” next to the custom field you defined for the browser.

On the right side, Zendesk shows the custom field ID (It is 177115 for us, but it will be something different for your Zendesk Help Desk).

Now let’s do the same thing for the account type information, by clicking on “add a new field mapping“.

This time, the data comes from a JavaScript variable, so we simply need to select Source type = JavaScript and source value = account_type (or whatever name you used for your variable).

On the Zendesk side, we’ll use the same object = Ticket and Type = custom with the custom field Id for the account_type.

That’s it, now when receiving a new support request from SnapABug, we automatically see those two custom fields populated automatically.

Like this:

In this article from TechVibes we reveal how SnapABug came about:
http://www.techvibes.com/blog/snapabug-the-story-of-a-techstars-incubation

Please keep the comments and feature requests coming, they really drive how we build SnapABug for you.

SnapABug now lets you have multiple widget configuration attached to a same profile.

This is extremely handy when you want requests from your development environment sent to your bug tracker while support requests from production should go to your help desk.

The multi widget option is also used by our customers with a white label solution who need support requests sent to a specific organization based on the website they originated from.

The multi widget option is available for SnapABug Business and Enterprise.

Discover other benefits of SnapABug, by checking out our features page.

The Web Marketing Blog (WEBマーケティング ブログ) wrote a very detailed review of TimZon (with a lot of screenshots)

Original Japanese Version: [Click here]

English Translation: [Click here]

We just released SnapABug, a new and visual way to request customer support.

SnapABug helps web site operators to help their customers faster.

Most support interaction could be much faster if the support team could see what their customers are seeing when they are requesting support. But today the only way to do this is to either ask the user for a screen capture (not easy and slow) or start an online meeting (requires everybody to be available at the same time).

With SnapABug, your support team receives a snapshot of the user web page display, along with additional debug information directly with the support request. With this information in hand, the support team can provide more targeted information to your users, improving customer satisfaction while saving time (and therefore money).

Check it out at: http://snapabug.com and join our beta program to get the SnapABug Help widget on your website.

We can’t wait for you to start using SnapAbug.
Jerome.

Thank you StickerGiant for the awesome TimZon stickers.

We recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Bas de Baar for his Project Shrink Blog.

You can see the Video PodCast of the interview (and part of the TimZon team) at: http://blog.softwareprojects.org/timzon-global-virtual-1652.html

Project Shrink is a very good resource for project managers navigating today’s distributed and virtual environment.  Check it out and subscribe at: http://blog.softwareprojects.org/

Project Shrink Video PodCast about TimZon

In this long overdue post, I would like to tell you more about what the TimZon team is up to (it also explains why you haven’t heard much from us lately).

For the last few weeks, we work closely with you TimZon users and also new potential users to gather more information about what you would like TimZon to do better for you.

Based on this feedback, we are hard at work developing the latest and best version of TimZon.

Here are some of the highlights of what to expect in this upcoming release:

- We realize that you may not always want to be in front of a camera and will now offer the ability to minimize the camera. Down the road, we will also be able to only record your voice if you only wish to do so.

- In the current version, the drawing area for the whiteboard is pretty small, and not that useful. The whiteboard will almost cover the entire screen, giving you enough space to describe the most complex ideas visually. In addition, Images upload and later screen capture will let you show and comment; This will be ideal to provide feedback on user interface or graphic designs.

We are really exited about those changes and more I didn’t describe here, but still need few more days to fully test this release to provide you with a solution of quality.

We would really like to hear back from you and learn about other changes you would like to see, to make TimZon a better solution for you. Feel free to contact us by email, by replying to this post or any other way.

Thank you,
The TimZon team.

Did we mentioned that we now have a Facebook fan page?
You can find it at: facebook.timzon.com

We are regularly posting information there, as well as on this blog and on twitter.

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In today’s global environment, remote teams have become experts at sharing the pain of working around time zones, by starting early every other week or by taking the late conference call from home. When working on multiple projects this means late and early calls most days of the week and Sundays (because it is already Monday somewhere).

With TimZon the communication is asynchronous; this means you can do it on your own time. As soon as you have an idea, feedback or just something that you want to share, you can simply start TimZon and record a video. Your correspondent will also get it on his own time, without loosing any value of the message. You can add more information through comments, links and diagrams if needed.

Please share your virtual (distributed) team experience with us and how we could make TimZon a better tool to help you in your daily communication.

Thanks,
The TimZon team.

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Understanding more about each other is key to creating a cohesive team.
This is especially true when working over great distances with little chances for personal interaction.

The best way to create a shared personal experience is to meet face to face.
Unfortunately this is not always feasible and practical. And with the current economic climate, travel budget is often the first thing being reduced.

While Email has become accepted a the primary form of business communication, it doesn’t convey emotions and can be very inefficient for project collaboration.
And we won’t mention here the spiral email overload effect…

Timzon combines the advantage of the asynchronous communication with a more personal interaction through video.
Many studies show that the majority of information conveyed in a conversation is non-verbal.
Video is the perfect alternative to face-to-face, in order to convey all the subtle emotions that would be lost otherwise and are key to a successful communication.
also, unlike traditional video email solutions, TimZon presents the communication is a neatly organized discussion thread.
You can at any time invite another participant to the discussion and they will get at the same level of understanding than the original team by following the discussion from the beginning.

Please share your virtual (distributed) team experience with us and how we could make TimZon a better tool to help you in your daily communication.

Thanks,
The TimZon team.

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We started TimZon to facilitate the communication of ideas remotely.

While the previous release was successfull in providing just this, a major redesign was necessary to make it more accessible to all and overall a better experience.

Thanks to your numerous feedback, we are releasing today a newer and much better version of TimZon that will revolutionize the way we are communicating. We think you are going to like it…

Organize your discussions:

By adopting a more conventional email-like interface you can now sort through all the discussions and at a glance see to what is new.

In the discussion list, you can now directly Archive or Delete one or multiple discussions.

Don’t worry, you can easily Restore a discussion from the “Deleted” group or move an archived discussion back To Inbox from “All discussions”.

Use the star to flag discussions that are important to you and find them easily in the “Starred” folder.

Synchronized events:

Because sometime more information needs to be shared than what can showned in video, we’ve added the ability to share text comments and whiteboard while recording a new video.

Simply click on “Beta: add time-stamped information” under the video recorder and add synchronized events.

By the way, you can now add links in text comments and they while be showned as hyperlink.

RSS feeds:

Get update about your discussions directly from your preferred feed reader.
Select the “Settings” menu to access your personalize feed.

What’s next:

We have several improvements in the works to make the TimZon experience more enjoyable, but we would really like to hear from you to know what features you would like to see added to TimZon.

Please feel free to contact us through the About page. Your feedback is important to us.

You can now sign up for TimZon even if you don’t have a GMail or Google Apps account.

Any email address will work.

Once in TimZon, you will be able to add and invite your contacts using the big green “New Contact” button in the Contact tab:

Same as before, If you sign in using your GMail or Google Apps account, all your contacts will automatically be retrieved from Google contacts. (We do not store your contacts information or send email to your contacts unless you decide to invite them to Timzon).

Please do not hesitate to contact us for any question, problem or suggestion:
customer_service@timzon.com
or
http://getsatisfaction.com/timzon

We are very excited, TimZon is now in the KillerStartups Top 3 for this month (and this year too).

Vote for us: